Of serpents and crosses

Readings

Numbers 21:4b-9    Moses lifts up a bronze serpent in the wilderness
Psalm 98:1-4    The LORD has done marvelous things. (Ps. 98:1)
1 Corinthians 1:18-24    The cross is the power of God to those who are being saved
John 3:13-17    The Son of Man will be lifted up

I’ve thought about bringing in a toy snake and winding it around the cross as a visual aid. It would certainly be an interesting thought experiment, wouldn’t it? What is this snake doing there, when the first time we see a snake in scripture is as the accuser in the Garden, the one who asks Eve if God really told them all they needed to know and could be trusted. The one snake who was then cursed to travel on its belly because it had brought people so low.

So what would such an animal have to do with the “life-saving cross, on which was hung the salvation of the world”? In the reading from Numbers, the people are being killed by snakebite because they’ve been complaining about life in the wilderness since their rescue from Egypt. It’s a long, difficult road to the Promised Land, and they are starting to think the mess they were in before has got to be better than where they’re headed. More of them start questioning God’s goodness, more telling God they know better, more looking back like Lot’s wife, though it doesn’t turn any of them into pillars of salt. It’s back to those questions from the garden again: Does God really want what’s best for us?

Today is celebrated as Holy Cross day, the festival set way back when the place of the crucifixion of Jesus was found, and they dedicated a church building there. Not an easy task, since there were so many crucifixions back then, it would be like finding the one Dunkin’ Donuts or the one Stewarts where Jesus might have gotten coffee that one time. We Christians tend to make a big deal about this one particular cross, or, I should say, the one particular man who died on this one cross among thousands. It’s almost like the rest of Jesus’ life and ministry comes second to this one moment in time when God and death met head-on and for a dark and terrifying moment God seemed to have lost the wager. 

But it was a wager made on our behalf, on our heads, for our sake. Because we don’t have the power to stand up to death once we have entered into a bargain with it. And bargain we did, way back when that first serpent first said, ‘Do you really think God will care one way or the other about you?’ We have been dying ever since, in big and small ways. The cross of Jesus is there to save us from this debt to death that we could never hope to repay - I’d pay off my student loans ten times over - plus interest! - before I’d be able to even start thinking about how to pay off this wager gone bad. 

So God enters into this contract with us, this covenant, where life is spent to save life, where blood is spilled to give new life, and as with most gods, the cost is a sacrifice of one life for another. Unlike any other gods, this God handles the whole thing without demanding any of our blood. We didn’t count on it being the author of life who would enter that sort of arrangement. Leaving us with nothing to do on our own behalf to take care of the debts we have accrued. Nothing to do but look at them, square in the face.

That’s the connection I’ve made this time reading through the story from Numbers, and by Jesus’ reference to it according to John’s Gospel. Those serpents, brought on by the people’s willful and arrogant bad behavior, became the very tool of their healing when they only looked at one bronze serpent held up before them. They could not pretend they hadn’t gotten what was coming to them. They couldn’t pretend they had been either grateful or faithful. They could not look away from their own anguish and from the things which threatened to kill them.

Neither can we look away from Christ lifted up on the cross, from the things we do to him each and every time we ignore, misappropriate, and abuse his name and his people. Every time humanity has splintered community and gone the way of every one for themselves our species has broken creation’s covenant with our creator. But now that we have seen the cross, those sins, no matter how deep, are not anymore a source of despair for us. We know that these things that are so terrible in the light of holiness are ultimately without the power to define us - thanks be to the one who was everything humanity was created to be, and who allowed death to taste him last of all, to give him up first of all.

We center our faith on this cross, on this free gift of God which repairs the breach between us. Not only is the brokenness we see carried up on this cross, but the brokenness we have grown accustomed to is there, also. Our ancient saints, the first followers of the Way, the first to be called ‘Christians,’ knew that something peculiar was happening when it was Jesus of Nazareth up there suffocating to death with nails in his hands and feet. We have tried for generations to make sense of it, to organize some philosophy, wisdom, theories, around a man, who is also God, dying just like any other Jew of bold integrity in those days would have been killed by the powers and principalities… but the cross does not make sense. We have talked about it so long that we may have gotten used to it, certainly, but here is a man, who is also God, who has the authority to bring down fire and plague upon our heads, and instead he is loving the world - the actual, flesh and blood world that we lived in then and that we live in today - up to his very last breath, and then some.

We cannot properly fear and love God without this gift. We cannot properly know God without this mystery. Yet this gift and this mystery are offered freely to us, without any merit on our part, without our even wanting to love God or know God better.

Madison said to me last Spring: “Tell me a story about Jesus. I miss him.” This cross is the central story about Jesus, and from it we tell all of our other stories about Jesus. Feeding the 5,000. Walking on water. Healing the lepers. Welcoming the children. It all comes from the very same Jesus whose life, death, and resurrection bring God and humanity - God and the whole of the cosmos! - back together again in right relationship. The lover and the beloved. And none shall separate us from that love.